


What we are, we remain

by Naraht



Series: Post World War Two Blues [3]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1960s, Aging, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, M/M, Queer Themes, decades later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1968, Laurie goes to see Andrew speak about the war in Vietnam, but he isn't sure that he's ready to deal with the feelings stirred up by their reunion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What we are, we remain

_London, 1968_

A few years ago now Laurie had started walking with a stick again. It was not exactly that the knee was worse, though he had to acknowledge that it was. It was more, as he told Ralph once, that the rest of him needed the help. What he had resented as a young man now seemed an aid and a comfort rather than an affront to his pride. He had after all just turned fifty.

He saw the poster as he was walking to the Tube from Broadcasting House. It was flyposted somewhere, tattered at the corners, not the sort of thing that he would usually have paused to examine. But he stopped in his tracks, leaning on his stick.

 _Thursday at 8pm_  
 _Andrew Raynes_  
 _of Oxfam_  
 _will speak on_  
 _"The Quaker Response to Vietnam"_  
 _Friends House, Euston Road_

Laurie stood and blinked at it as though it were a message from another life.

***

When Laurie came through the door of the flat, Ralph got to his feet to welcome him home. Ralph always did.

"Spuddy." He kissed Laurie and took his coat. "How was work?"

"Oh, the uproar continues. Half the old guard are still saying 'Third Programme' and plotting bloody revolution. I said to one of the Radio One boys today that I was still mourning the end of the Forces Programme and I think he half believed me. He probably wasn't even born then."

Ralph chuckled. Without Laurie's influence his radio listening would have begun and ended with the Shipping Forecast, but he had been a staunch supporter and confidante during the recent re-organisation at Broadcasting House.

"And you?" added Laurie.

"Just correcting proofs. I've promised to have them done by the end of the month, more fool me. Shall I put on tea? I've got in some Darjeeling."

"Yes please."

Laurie sank into one of the chairs in the sitting room, balancing his stick by its side. He picked up a newspaper, but the headline on the front page would have caught his attention anyway. _Tet Offensive continues_ , it said.

Ralph came through with the tea, a pot on a tray. Laurie carried on staring at the headline. He began to count to ten.

"I saw a poster today," he said finally. "A talk on the Quaker response to Vietnam. Andrew is the speaker."

"Andrew…? Oh. Yes. You mean Raynes."

It hung in the air between them for a moment. Ralph recovered first.

"When is it, Spuddy? You'll be going, of course."

"It's on Thursday, but… I don't know that I will, Ralph. What would I have to say to him? It's been nearly thirty years."

"All the more reason," said Ralph crisply. In that earlier short pause he had obviously decided his line, and he was sticking to it.

"Is it?"

"Look, Spud. If you don't go, you'll always be wondering what would have happened if you had. So will I. Best not to wonder."

"But you have nothing to wonder about," Laurie objected.

Ralph began to pour the tea. He gave Laurie a wry look.

"Aren't you going to come back and tell me all about the Quaker line on Vietnam?"

***

They didn't speak about it again until Thursday night, when Laurie was in the hall putting on his scarf and looking around to see where he'd left his gloves. Ralph handed him his stick--the good one, the one from James Smith & Sons that Ralph had bought him for his fiftieth--and looked at him with a serious expression utterly unsuited to the mundane task of gathering up one's belongings for an evening lecture.

"Whatever happens between you, Spud," he said, "it's all right. None of my business and I won't ask."

"Ralph!" exclaimed Laurie. "Don't let's start this again. I don't like it now any more than I did then."

"No, don't prejudge it. You don't know how you might feel."

"I do know how I feel," said Laurie, but Ralph continued.

"Once I would have said the same thing for different reasons, but the point now is that it can't change what the two of us have. I know it; I think you know it too. That's why."

And once Laurie would have continued to argue, whatever Ralph's reasons had been. Now he just kissed Ralph, took the proffered stick, and went out the door.

***

Friends House was a nondescript building just opposite Euston, one which Laurie had passed many times and yet somehow never noticed. It was odd to think that Andrew had probably been coming here, leading his own life, for years now.

They had lost track of one another after the war. Or had it been during the war? Laurie found that he couldn't now remember. He had sent a notice of his new London address to Andrew, via Dave, and received no acknowledgment. It hadn't been till several years later that it had occurred to him to wonder whether his own letter might have gone astray.

In the early fifties he'd finally nerved himself to make a trip to the house in the East End, whose address he would never forget. He'd found the street unrecognisable, the villas wiped off the face of the earth, a block of cheap flats under rapid construction. He'd walked up and down a few times, as disoriented as if the whole thing had been a dream. Then he'd taken a bus back to the station. The tram had gone too.

And now here he was waiting to hear Andrew give a talk on Vietnam. He'd expected a small, cozy seminar room like the ones in which he'd discussed Donne and Marvell at Oxford. _To his coy mistress…_

Instead he'd walked into a lecture theatre larger than anything at the Exam Schools, big enough to seat hundreds. There was a spotlight on the stage but no sign of the speaker. Laurie sat near the back of the theatre, wanting an aisle seat where he could remain undisturbed, but the room was filling quickly and he had to painfully stand twice to allow apologetic young people to squeeze past him. It was an oddly heterogenous audience, half earnest-looking Friends of all ages, half young radicals. Laurie thought he could detect a hint of marijuana smoke in the air, its scent newly familiar from the halls of Broadcasting House.

Andrew appeared punctually, without introduction, at the stroke of eight. Laurie gazed forward over rows of heads, trying to make out every detail of the distant man standing alone beside the lectern. He was casually dressed, in a maroon jumper and corduroy trousers. He brushed back from his forehead a lock of his longish fair hair with a motion that was very familiar. Laurie watched him with a strange double vision, blinking as though he could clear the years from his eyes.

"Let me start, first of all, by welcoming you to Friends House," said Andrew. "Some of you may have visited us before, but I expect that many of you haven't. For those who haven't, I'll begin by telling you a little bit about the Society of Friends, and why you might be interested in hearing what we have to say about the war in Vietnam. After that we'll get on to the question of what we--you and I together, that is--might do about it."

A scattering of ironic applause from the gallery. Andrew ignored it.

For the next hour he carried on in similar style, the same thoughtful, unassuming tone that he had once used when speaking to Laurie alone. Laurie learned that Andrew had recently returned from a trip to Vietnam in partnership with the American Friends Service Committee, and before that had visited several times with Oxfam.

"What I saw there," he said, "was as disturbing as anything that I saw when I was on the Continent with the Friends Ambulance Unit, during and after the war."

He spoke simply but powerfully about the humanitarian crisis. There were slides, showing a very different side of things from what one read in the newspapers. It was the sort of carnage that Laurie had once seen on the beaches of Dunkirk.

For the final fifteen minutes of the talk Andrew took questions. Laurie could have thought of a thousand things to ask, some of them even relevant to the talk--this sort of thing was, after all, his bread and butter at the BBC--but he restrained himself from doing so.

He was not the only one to go forward afterwards to have a word with the speaker. Laurie stood to one side, leaning on his stick, and let the other supplicants have their time. It gave him the chance to observe Andrew at closer quarters.

The years had treated Andrew kindly. He had filled out a little since Laurie had seen him last, but the slight roundness in his face made him look younger rather than older. Laurie found it hard to believe that he was nearly fifty.

When the last of the supplicants turned to go, the two of them were finally alone together, with no one else within earshot.

"I'm so sorry," said Andrew in the kindly, distracted tones of a lecturer. "You've been waiting a long time, haven't you?"

Then their eyes finally connected. Andrew blinked, his lips stammering a syllable that Laurie didn't catch.

"Laurie," he said. "It's you. Laurie. I never--"

"It's me," said Laurie simply. 

Andrew took a step forward and embraced him. They stood like that for a moment longer than they ought. Laurie closed his eyes involuntarily, conscious of the background sounds of people leaving the room, and the warmth of Andrew's body against his, and the fact that he had never been held in Andrew's arms before.

It was Andrew who broke the embrace, stepping backwards again. A smile had spread across his face.

"I saw your name on a poster," said Laurie by way of explanation. "I had to come."

"After all this time," said Andrew. "I had always wondered."

"When I moved to London in '45, I sent Dave my new address, but perhaps--"

"I tried to write to you at Stowe, but I had the letter returned--"

"So that's--"

They laughed together, the awkwardness and uncertainty of two decades swept away in a moment.

"I thought of looking you up through Oxford," Andrew said. "I never did go, myself. I was sure that your college would have your address, but I wondered whether perhaps you might not want..."

"Of course I would have," said Laurie.

Andrew stood and regarded him solemnly, a smile still half playing around his lips.

"I don't suppose we ought to stay here, but would you like to go for a drink? There's a good place quite nearby."

"I can't, not this evening. Ralph will be expecting me back."

It was a lie. He knew very well that Ralph would not be expecting him for hours yet. 

( _If at all_ , he thought. The pang he felt at that convinced him that he had made the right decision.)

"Of course," said Andrew. "But I'm very glad you came to see me. Thank you."

That pang was entirely a different one. Andrew had obviously learned in the intervening years how to take a dismissal, and perhaps someone who did not know him so well would never have noticed it, but Laurie could sense the faint note of injury in his voice, a subtle closing-in of his manner. Andrew had read the rebuff exactly as it had been intended. Laurie felt as though he personally had just leveled a small Vietnamese village.

"We have a flat in St. John's Wood," he said. "Ralph and I, that is, it's where we moved in '45. Would you like to come to us for dinner next week? I'm sure we'd have a great deal to talk about."

Andrew nodded, and said all the polite things that one was meant to say on such occasions. Diaries were taken out and they arranged the date.

A terrible thought struck Laurie. "If there's someone you'd like to bring with you...?" he added delicately.

"No," said Andrew, a sudden bleakness in his tone. "No, there isn't."

***

On the night appointed for the dinner party, Laurie came home from work to find Ralph near the end of a whirlwind of cleaning and tidying. When Ralph came into the hall to greet him, he had a dusting cloth thrown over his shoulder and a faintly harassed expression on his face.

"If you could have found a bit of brass in this flat," said Laurie affectionately after their kiss, "I'm sure you would have polished it."

"I did," replied Ralph with mock offence. "I polished the barometer."

"You didn't have to do all this. I'm sure that Andrew wouldn't have noticed."

"I would have noticed. It's not every day that... Well."

Laurie supposed that it was true. He glanced into the dining room to see the table already set for three, rather splendidly, as if an Admiral were expected for dinner.

"I had one question for you," Ralph added.

"I do think the candles are a bit much."

"No, not that. Though I thought they might be; I'll put them back in the cupboard." He paused. "It was actually the glove I was wondering about."

Laurie looked down at Ralph's bare left hand. His sleeves were rolled up for the cleaning, and one could see the sinews of lean strength in his forearm, running down into the remaining tendons of his hand, all the strength he'd had to cultivate in order to compensate for it.

"Only if you feel you want it," said Laurie quietly.

They looked at one another. 

"Spuddy," said Ralph, "what I really want is another kiss. If you wouldn't mind."

Laurie did not mind at all.

***

Laurie spent the dinner glancing between the two of them: lean, silver-haired Ralph and plump, still-blond Andrew. They looked less alike than they once had, but they regarded one another across the table with the same expression of grave, wary courtesy.

Andrew ate his dinner with every sign of appreciation and did not seem to look askance at the lack of a wine bottle on the table. Laurie was glad of that. Though it had been over a decade since Ralph had stopped drinking for good, any necessary reference to this small weakness of Ralph's still left him feeling fiercely protective.

In the early parts of the meal Laurie did most of the talking. Broadcasting House lent itself to anecdote in those days, so he spoke at some length about the vicissitudes of life at the BBC. Perhaps he went on longer than he had intended, but he was encouraged by the feeling of Andrew's eyes upon him.

"And Ralph, what do you do?" asked Andrew finally, with a dutiful air.

"A bit of scribbling here and there," said Ralph. He had never come, somehow, to view it as a proper job.

"He's a travel writer," put in Laurie. "He started out by publishing his memoirs in '54."

"It was '55," corrected Ralph.

He should have remembered. It had been the year after Ralph was cashiered from the Security Services, a very dark period for both of them. Ralph had written the book in an alcoholic haze, suitable perhaps for reminiscence, but less satisfactory in other ways.

"In '55," repeated Laurie, putting all that out of his mind, "and it sold so well that since then he's never been short of commissions. Four books now, as well as all the articles."

Andrew's interest had been piqued. "That must be very interesting. Have you been to Vietnam?"

Laurie was reminded--he had known it once--that Andrew's conversation tended at times towards a certain doggedness.

"I can't say that I have," said Ralph, amused. "Java, Malaya, Burma… Hong Kong and Singapore many times, though that was mostly in my Merchant Marine days. I did an article on Japan last year. But never Vietnam."

Andrew seemed a bit apologetic. "I suppose I've spent the past twenty years following war and famine around the globe. I can't think the last time I've taken a proper holiday."

"Laurie told me you were on the lecture circuit nowadays."

"I've done a bit more of that since we came back to England," said Andrew.

Laurie could not help but react to Andrew's casually spoken 'we.' Surely he had said on Thursday that he had no one whom he wanted to bring to dinner. Did he have a lover whom he was keeping secret? Or, more likely still, a wife? Laurie supposed that he would have good reason for not wanting to introduce her to himself and Ralph, yet was stung by the thought of such uncharacteristic duplicity on Andrew's part.

From there it was but a short step to envisioning Mrs. Raynes. She would be a Quaker, of course, and saintly. Andrew would feel the same devotion to her that he had once felt for his mother. God, would they have had children? Laurie supposed that they could be out of university by now. He imagined himself, suddenly, horribly, as Dave, speaking about one of them to some other young man: _Except in character sometimes, I never see Andrew in him at all_.

Andrew must have noticed Laurie's expression of dismay. "It's rather a long story," he said.

"Go on," said Ralph. He cast a cautious look at Laurie, as if watching to see how Laurie would take it.

"I met Geoffrey when I was in the East End, during the Blitz," Andrew began.

Laurie relaxed instantly. Andrew continued:

"We were living in Oxford together, Laurie, when I last saw you. We went to the Continent with the FAU and then stayed there after the war, working for Oxfam. After that we traveled around doing relief work. It wasn't until 1963, when Geoffrey became ill, that we decided to move back to England permanently." A look at Andrew's face was enough to guess that the prognosis had not been good. "It was cancer. He was quite a bit older than me, you see. He died three years ago."

"My condolences," said Ralph.

"Since then I suppose I've felt the need to share some of what we experienced together, some of what we believed. So there's been the lecturing, and of course the campaign work."

"Campaign work?" echoed Laurie. He felt very slightly behind the conversation, still reeling from the imaginary Mrs. Raynes and the very real, if less alarming, Geoffrey.

"For homosexual equality," said Andrew.

Ralph discreetly coughed into his glass of water; Laurie supposed that he must look equally stunned. Andrew gave both of them a puzzled look.

"I'm sorry if I've said anything amiss. I'd assumed that the two of you would--"

"We generally try to keep our heads down," said Ralph, annoyed. "And mostly we succeed."

"We thought that once, Geoffrey and I. We didn't see the point of provoking for the sake of provocation. But eventually it came to seem a matter of justice. And now, with the Sexual Offences Act passed, I don't see a reason to hide any longer."

"Before he started writing," Laurie explained tactfully, feeling that he was close to averting bloodshed, "Ralph used to do government work. This was around the time of Burgess and MacLean, and Wildeblood, and the rest."

"Oh," said Andrew.

"I don't mind admitting," said Ralph, "that all of this has come rather late for me. Twice over at least. I dare say that affects my views."

Something must have clicked in Andrew's memory. He stopped and looked at Ralph as though he were seeing him for the first time. _What_ , thought Laurie, _could he possibly be remembering?_ Then Laurie thought of a long-ago conversation with Andrew, telling him about a boy he'd known who was expelled from school. _And all the time he'd done it after all._ At the time he'd thought that Andrew was listening with attention; now he knew just how much. The expression on Andrew's face had changed from conviction to quiet sympathy.

"Yes," he said. "It would. I do see that."

"We've all been through the wars," said Laurie. "In one way or another."

"But who hasn't?" said Ralph, with his tone of practiced conversational ease. "Laurie, shall I bring through the pudding now?"

***

After the pudding Ralph absented himself again to do the washing up, leaving Laurie and Andrew alone. For a long time they sat together in companionable silence, just as they had once done in their long-ago Eden. Laurie could not help remembering Andrew lying there sleepily, shirtless, in the autumn sun.

"I'm very glad that you're so happy," said Andrew finally, as wistful and kind as if he had still been a boy of nineteen.

Laurie had nothing to say to that. Instead he reached out and put his hand on Andrew's. He could see that Andrew meant what he said, and yet that it had cost him a great deal of pain to bring himself to the point where he could say it honestly.

"I did love you," said Laurie finally. "You know that."

Andrew swallowed hard, nodded. "And you know that I--"

"Yes," said Laurie. He interrupted before he could discover what he already knew: that for Andrew the sentence was, and would remain, in the present tense. He took his hand away.

From the kitchen there came the sound of tuneless whistling. A moment later Ralph came back into the room.


End file.
